The beginners guide to Direct Mail

Beginners guide to Direct Mail?
Here at 121 Direct Mail we regularly review the Royal Mail marketing website, one article that caught our eye was really going back to direct mail basics, we have taken that article and added a few of our own thoughts which we trust you will find helpful and informative.

Want to tell people about your latest product, offer or opening, grow your reputation and brand, win new customers, or simply tell the story about your professional image? All of this and more can be achieved by direct mail.

Mailshots are proven as a brilliant form of advertising. More and more businesses, large and small, are still seeing the effectiveness of building customer relationships by post even with the advent of email as they see it as a reinforcement and directional pointing to their online activity.

Whether it’s a ‘warm’ highly personalised mailshot or a ‘cold’ unaddressed door drop, direct mail can be an extremely targeted, personal and creative way to engage people who are or could be your next customer.

At 121 Direct Mail we provide an insight into direct mail as a marketing tool and can take you step by step through the process of producing your own mailshot or door drop campaign.

Put your business in your customers’ hands
In every door there is a letterbox. Through those letterboxes are your customers, either at home or at work. The post arrives. They pick it up, and your business, your image, your product or service, your offer is in their hands.

You talk to them. You tell them your news. You make them an offer. You get a response. You close the sale. Then, over time, you need to keep talking to them as it’s far easier to sell something more to an established customer than to gain a new client. If you build a good relationship, they become loyal, lifelong customers, buying your products and services time and time again, and recommending you to their friends.

The sceptics may say “Yes, that’s the theory, but that doesn't really happen in the real world,” Only it does: it's called direct mail marketing. It can be a mailshot (personally addressed advertising) or a door drop (unaddressed advertising sent to specific postcode areas).

Direct Mail is used by all types of businesses, in all sectors, to acquire customers, retain them and encourage them to spend more. It's a highly targeted, highly personal, highly successful form of marketing that's worth over £25 billion in sales revenue each year in the UK alone.

So how does it work?
Target, Target, Target

Whether targeting consumers (b2c, business-to-consumer) or businesses (b2b, business-to-business), mail is a precise and personal form of marketing. It's one of the few media that enables you to know exactly who you are talking to, where they live and what interests them.

Information about your customers is crucial to any mailshot. This may already exist in its most basic form as a list of your existing customers’ names and addresses. Or you can buy a list of potential customers to match your target audience from our sister company Mailing Lists UK.

Refining your customer information helps to target your audience more accurately for more effective mailings. It can also provide a clearer understanding of the person. What age are they? What income? Are they male or female? Are they avid readers, or into sports and exercise? Do they give to good causes, or are they keen investors? The more information you can draw on, the more precise you can be in your targeting.

The aim is to put information in the hands of those people who are more likely to want to hear from you, and therefore more likely to respond and spend.


Dear “Personalised”, Dear Friend
Mailshots, also known as direct mail, are the highly personalised form of marketing by mail. You have known names and addresses of either existing customers (a ‘warm’ list) or people who fit your target audience and are potential customers (a ‘cold’ list).

Door drops, sometimes known as door-to-door, are the unaddressed form of marketing, where you don't have the names of the people you want to reach. These mailings can be very similar in form and content as personalised mail, but are delivered to areas (districts and postcodes) that fit your target audience's profile or a catchment area for your shop or services.

Both forms of mail can be used individually or together in any campaign, and often play key roles in wider, integrated campaigns using TV, radio, press, web and outdoor advertising.


RSVP
People respond to mail like no other media. They really read it. Research shows that people can spend up to 10 minutes reading mailshots. They digest the information in their own time and at their own pace, and then decide to act, or not.

Mail provides businesses with a discrete, individualised environment to get a response from an individual customer. And there are many tools and techniques that can be used to help you get that response.

The first and most important is to have a compelling reason for the customer to respond (a fantastic offer…only available from this mailshotl…for a limited period only…etc) and then provide the customer with the easiest way to respond, be that freepost, freefone or online. The very medium of a mailshot offers you the chance to be more engaging, more persuasive and even more detailed in what you have to say and sell, you have already got their attention with the letter in their hands, so now you can deliver your sales message in the best possible way to gain a RSVP.


A Flexible Medium
Longer, more persuasive messaging, with deeper, richer information. Mailshots allow you to set out your stall in as structured and as engaging a style as you wish. start collecting mailshots that land on your doormat and see the styles they use to persuade, if you are a small company “steal with pride” the ideas and styles used successfully by the big boys!

Mailshots and door drops can be created in many different formats and often include one or any number of the following items:

Letters and postcards
Leaflets
Brochures
Catalogues
CD’s / DVDs
Samples

The key thing is to exploit mail as an exciting and engaging medium. It is one of the few media that can affect all the senses - sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

Creative and well thought through mailshots really do help get your message across, and solicit that all important response. The possibilities are restricted only by imagination, budget...and the size of the standard letterbox.

Postage Discountswhen costing your mailshot, don’t fall into the trap of just using standard 1st or 2nd class postage costs as discounts on postage are available for most mailshots. Discounts vary dependent on volume, size and weight of the direct mail piece. Ideally it is worth discussing this very early on with a direct mailing fulfilment company like 121 Direct Mail, who will be happy to advise you on the best solution for discounts on your mailing.

Licking the Envelopes
How often have we heard about DIY mailshots where a full team of admin staff are printing 1000’s of letters on their desktop printers, then spending days folding and inserting them into envelopes, licking the envelope and putting an address label and stamp on the front….. What a waste of time and effort…..121 Direct Mail fully automate that whole process and send out 1000’s of letters and mailings every day. You also don’t have to be sending millions to make it cost effective, postage discounts given on a few 1000 letters, are often greater than the cost of printing and inserting the letters, and its done in a quarter of the time, leaving your staff to get on with what you pay them to do!



If you are considering a mailing to your customers or prospective customers, then why not get in touch with 121 Direct Mail today and see just how much more efficient and productive your next sales campaign could be.


Facts about marketing by mail

Mail has the power to change the way people think and feel about you, because you can make it so personally relevant.

Mail is engaging. Consumers spend on average 10 minutes reading mailshots. Compare the cost of that length of exposure against other media such as TV.

Mail is a tangible form of advertising. It gives you a physical presence in your customers’ home or office, and can literally put your product in their hands.

Mail can be targeted to reach very specific audiences - almost every individual, household and business in the UK can be reached by mail.

Mail can support and deepen relationships with your customers, building awareness as part of integrated campaigns, or involving customers with your business as part of ongoing, two-way communications. It can provide one of the few opportunities for people who actually use your product or service to tell you how they use it, why, and what else they would like from you.

Doordrops (unaddressed mail) offer you the chance to talk to people you don't know. You can profile and target lists of likely customers - either in broad geographic or lifestyle bands, or through the use of highly specific street-by-street or even door-by-door data.

It is estimated that consumer mailshots generate more than £25 billion of business each year. For every £1 spent, £14 is generated.

Mailshot expenditure has increased by 155% in the last 12 years.